Garment-based body sensing using foam sensors

Wearable technology is omnipresent to the user. Thus, it has the potential to be significantly disruptive to the user's daily life. Context awareness and intuitive device interfaces can help to minimize this disruption, but only when the sensing technology itself is not physically intrusive: i.e., when the interface preserves the user's homeostatic comfort. This work evaluates a novel foambased sensor for use in body-monitoring for contextaware and gestural interfaces. The sensor is particularly attractive for wearable interfaces due to its positive wearability characteristics (softness, pliability, washability), but less precise than other similar sensors. The sensor is applied in the garment-based monitoring of breathing, shoulder lift (shrug), and directional arm movement, and its accuracy is evaluated in each application. We find the foam technology most successful in detecting the presence of movement events using a single sensor, and less successful in measuring precise, relative movements from the coordinated responses of multiple sensors. The implications of these results are considered from a wearable computing perspective.